Quotes from Harry Crews

Men to whom God is dead worship one another.

There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.

The artist lives in an atmosphere of perpetual failure.

Teaching, real teaching, is - or ought to be - a messy business.

Survival is triumph enough.

Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober.

Blood is our only permanent history, and blood history does not admit of revision

I went out the side door, and Sam fell into step behind me as we walked out beyond the mule barn where four mules stood in the lot and on past the cotton house and then down the dim road past a little leaning shack where our tenant farmers lived, a black family in which there was a boy just a year older than I was. His name was Willalee Bookatee. I went on past their house because I knew they would be in the field, too, so there was no use to stop

We all of us are made out of dirt. God took him up some dirt and put it in his hands and rolled it around and then he spit in the dirt and rolled it some more and out of that dirt and God spit, he made you and me, all of us.

Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people. It is all-the good and the bad-carted up and brought along from one generation to the next. And everything that is brought along is colored and shaped by those who bring it.

An oak stump might cost a man a week of his life.

Everything is stories, and stories is everything

the biography of a childhood which necessarily is the biography of a place, a way of life gone forever out of the world.

A beating will loosen a child's hide and let him grow.

I had already learned—without knowing I'd learned it—that every single thing in the world was full of mystery and awesome power. And it was only by right ways of doing things—ritual ways—that kept any of us safe. Making stories about them was not so that we could understand them but so that we could live with them.

All Sam Peckinpah ever did in his movies was show that getting hit on the chin doesn't sound like [makes a small popping noise]. When one grown man hits another grown man in the face, it splatters like an overripe tomato. And it's not fun getting killed. It's bloody and gory and altogether unpleasant. That's all Sam Peckinpah ever did.

He did not know what love was. And he did not know what good it was. But he knew he carried it around with him, a scabrous spot of rot, of contagion, for which there was no cure.

There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with.

That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night.

I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it—you can't bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.

If you wait until you got time to write a novel, or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read - if you wait for the time, you will never do it. 'Cause there ain't no time; world don't want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.

If you love something/Set it free/If it loves you/It will come back to you/ If it doesn't--hunt it down and kill it.

Speaks well of a man to need a little something in this world. I wouldn't trust a man who could git through it cold sober.

survival is triumph enough.